| 14 | PARADIGMS |
It’s the end of metaphysics and the end of Thomism, but it’s also the swansong of positivism: truth cannot be the objective mirroring of factual data.
Already in Being and Time—and this is one of the fundamental keys to my understanding of Heidegger—he no longer believed in truth as conformity and correspondence. The scholastics had defined truth as the intellect in conformity to the thing. There’s the rub. If the world has shrunk to the results of scientific experimentation, then the real world is no more. If true Being is only what can be planned and calculated, then all the rest—sentiments, fears, loves—is just rubbish, stuff to throw away.
So the idea of truth as correspondence between affirmation and factual datum evaporates. Heidegger took this very much to heart. He is a fierce enemy of objectivity, because if the only true rationality is that of the positive sciences, the being of mankind—which he calls Dasein, that is, being in the world—becomes impossible to formulate in rational terms.
Is this threatening? Of course not. Where is it that scientists demonstrate the truth of their assertions? Within the community of scientists. If you adduce a theory from quantum physics, it is meaningless to me. First I have to learn the paradigm. Somehow or other I have to be initiated into this science, become a member, so to speak, of the confraternity. What does that have to do with objective knowledge valid for everyone at all times?
Everything comes about in history. No idea emerges independently of the historical moment.
In recent years I have stated this in all sorts of places, and nobody is scandalized any more. Fiat arose at the end of the nineteenth century, and so did the Ford Motor Company. Frederick Taylor, the Chicago engineer, wrote his book in 1907. The First World War was the first great war of materiel, which forced Western societies to become superorganized for production. It wasn’t an accident that Kuhn published his book in 1962. What was happening in America in 1962? The Vietnam War. Scientists were beginning to realize that they were doing science at the bidding of a society that was paying for their experiments. The point is the same: don’t imagine that what we are doing is searching for absolute truth; we are trying to understand certain things that are subservient to certain others.
Why on earth does Heidegger—the son of a sexton, someone who throughout the 1910s and into the early 1920s lived at Freiburg cultivating Bible studies and devoting himself to Saint Paul—start to turn against Saint Augustine? Because Saint Augustine introduced too much Greek philosophy into Christianity, he says. And why did he dislike that? Because he disliked the idea of Being as a spectacle that one might regard: Plato, ultimately.
In those years culture and philosophy were animated by revolt against the world Charlie Chaplin depicted in Modern Times, even though the film itself belongs to the 1930s. What is it they were against, these philosophers—Karl Jaspers, Karl Barth, Heidegger himself, early existentialism, even in part, and a lot earlier, Søren Kierkegaard? Against the idea that the dominant strain of Western philosophy had proceeded, from Plato to the positivists, as the unfolding of an idea of truth as objectivity, measurable and demonstrable. For the positivists the only truth was the scientific experiment. Positivistic philosophy served to organize society in a total, and so totalitarian, manner. Positivism was a murderous attack on ethics and liberty. And it had totalitarian society as its inevitable outcome.
I would add one more thing: Heidegger’s thought can also be read as a critique of the epoch from a fundamentally political perspective. His thought was driven principally by a refusal of scientific objectivism, not because it was untrue but because it was unjust.
Richard Rorty—whom I got to know a few years later—writes in one of his books that there are, as it were, two lines of modern thought, one Kantian and one Hegelian. The Kantian line seeks the conditions of truth always and everywhere; the Hegelian line seeks truth in the occurrence of Being in history.
If we take the view that Kant is right, or at any rate that there are eternal truths, then we also have to take the view that Aristotle and Plato were stupider than Heidegger, or even than Kant himself, because if truth is just there instead of coming about, then why didn’t they already see it? It makes more sense to assume, not that Heidegger was cleverer and more intelligent than Plato, but that Plato was living in a different constellation of Being.
Everything changes. The notion of truth changes. Naturally, the adepts of pure scientism bristle with anger. “What? Science is only valid in such and such a context?” Well, yes indeed, it is only valid in such and such a context.
But that is not as disorienting as it may seem; it doesn’t mean we float off into total relativism. Science sheds enough light to allow us to judge whether a proposition is false or not. When something is affirmed, the paradigm for verifying it is also adduced, the coordinates within which that affirmation is true or false are given.
And as far as vampires go, there are criteria for distinguishing the vampires from the nonvampires.